Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor. He has been based in New Delhi for four years. He is @DelhiDean on Twitter.

Where are India's great philanthropists?

What does it say about India that its most active philanthropists right now are Bill Gates and Prince Charles?

There are, of course, many Indian businessmen who give money to charity. The Hindujas in Britain have given large sums, as has the Tata family in India. But nothing on any great scale or with any real ambition in India itself.

Bill Gates has focussed a great deal of his time and personal fortune in improving access to education, raising awareness and offering treatment for HIV/AIDS and encouraging agricultural development in India.

Last year Prince Charles invited some of India's (and the world's) richest men to launch the British Asian Trust to protect its environment, preserve historic buildings, and support the young unemployed.

The invitation list included Ratan Tata, Indian's most enlightened industrialist, steel king Laxmi Mittal, property magnate K P Singh and India's richest man and arguably the world's best project manager, Mukesh Ambani. Their combined personal wealth easily topped £60 billion, but we've yet to see how deep they put their hands in the pockets or how much of their considerable talent and focus they gave.

Earlier this week, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi asked the question that has been on mind since I came to India almost four years ago: where are its great philanthropists? How can a country with so much wealth, technical know-how and management talent give so little back to its own people?

At a gathering attended by Bill Gates, she said: "Yours is an example that we in India ought to emulate. We have in our country a long but uneven tradition of philanthropy."

Referring to Sir Ratan Tata's foundation to study poverty and campaign for its eradication in 1912, she said: “There are other examples of Foundations set up by various Indian business houses. Many of them command resources. But it must be said that we are yet to produce a truly visionary contemporary philanthropist….Today, when we can proudly affirm that there is almost nothing that anyone else is doing around the world that we in India cannot do, you have set us a challenge."

It's clearly not a question of money: India is the world's second fastest growing economy and its tycoons are taking over the globe. As Sonia-ji points out, it's about vision and focus, as the case of tiny, impoverished Bangladesh's Grameen Bank highlights: the bank was formed to offer micro-loans to the poor to help them create and sustain their own businesses. Founder Muhammad Yunus's original idea inspired NGOs around the world and won him the Nobel Prize.

The opportunities for an Indian Yunus could not be better: despite its extraordinary growth, India resembles Victorian Britain in its uneven development. But where enlightened Victorian capitalists funded reservoir and sanitation projects to eradicate water-borne diseases, and helped establish great charities like the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, India's potential philanthropists remain ever-focussed on the bottom line rather than those at the bottom of its huge heap.

Instead of developing original ideas to unleash the potential of its hundreds of millions of untouchables and backward castes, many of its wealthiest figures are more often seen feathering their own spritual nests by donating large sums to Hindu temples.

I had been gloomy about this aspect of Hindu society until September 2007 when I was returning to Siliguri from visiting an abandoned tea plantation in Dooars, West Bengal, where the the employees and their families were starving. As my bus pulled up to the stop in torrential monsoon rain, I was met unexpectedly by three elderly gentlemen with unbrellas who startled me with the words:"Mr Nelson? We are disciples of S K Mitra and have come to show you our Ashram."

Their Ashram was a place of wonder – a state of the art hospital offering free medical and dental treatment to the poor, a pre-natal clinic for expecting mothers, and adult education classes.

S K Mitra, their late guru, believed Hindus would only be reincarnated into a better life if they served the poor in this one, they explained.

As India takes on its growing responsibilities as the world's first soft superpower, its billionaires must, as Sonia Gandhi and S K Mitra have suggested, look within as well as beyond.